Word: banking
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...These things can happen. What is important is how they are dealt with when they do. There was a serious bank failure in the U.K. when Johnson Matthey Bankers collapsed in 1984, while I was Chancellor of the Exchequer. After a few days of abortive attempts to find a genuine private-sector rescue, I authorized the Bank of England to take over JMB, close the business, and sort out the mess, which it duly did. Northern Rock is a larger and more complex case, but the principles are the same. Instead, Brown and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, spent five months...
...government has very belatedly concluded that a state takeover of Northern Rock is the only option. But even that has been badly mishandled. What should have been done was to put in a management with a remit to close the bank to new business, to stop all future lending, and to confine itself to managing the existing loan book and selling it off piecemeal to private-sector buyers as market conditions improve. After all, by one estimate, there is now some $200 billion of taxpayers' exposure to protect. Nor, of course, is the survival of Northern Rock of any strategic...
...take this worst possible course? The only plausible answer is so as to avoid the short-term political cost of a run-down of the bank, a major employer in the northeast of England, which is one of the Labour Party's heartlands. But the longer-term political cost to the government is likely to be very severe. Governments, like financial centers, need to be jealous of their reputation. The U.K.'s reputation as a financial center is sufficiently soundly based for it to recover from the blow inflicted by the Northern Rock affair. Whether the government's reputation...
...fees that typically pile up when more consumers are late to pay or exceed their credit limit?thus triggering a higher rate?are feeding a consumer backlash that is gaining strength. In 2007, 11,427 people filed complaints with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees bank-issued cards?a 13% increase over...
...reason the card industry is free to raise prices on existing customers at any time and for any reason is tied to deregulation, which began in banking in the 1970s and effectively eliminated caps both on interest and fees. Thanks to mergers and consolidation, the top six card issuers?Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, American Express, Capital One and Discover?now float about 75% of all outstanding credit-card debt, according to The Nilson Report. Consolidation allows competitors to be less competitive: from 1995 to 2005 the average late fee soared 162% from $12.83 to $33.64, according to CardTrak.com...